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Jensen Suthur at nonsite:

The first thing to note is that I whole-heartedly affirm Michaels’ now-classic claim that intentionality is constitutive of believing, acting, and therefore reading. Given the force of this claim, “Against Theory” should have been an object-lesson in swamp-draining, but in my view, its own quietism worked against its actual assimilation within literary studies. One way to put the problem is that Michaels is right to think that intentionality is descriptive of action and belief but wrong to think that it therefore has no normative role to play in the exercise of our agency.

For example, to be a friend is to be minimally abiding by the norms of friendship—versus, say, the norms of professional acquaintanceship. I thereby commit myself to doing certain things (showing up in times of need, lending a sympathetic ear, and so on) and not doing others (telling lies, being unreliable). But friendship can be pursued either well or poorly. A bad friend is not simply not-a-friend (a stranger) but someone who is committed to friendship and yet who is not making good on the commitment. Perhaps my friend compulsively lies, or borrows money and refuses to pay it back.

more here.

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David Ignatius in The Washington Post:

“There you have it, the meeting went well,” declared the Great Narrator a few hours after Saturday’s marathon, 21-hour negotiation with Iran ended. “Most points were agreed to, but the only point that really mattered, NUCLEAR, was not.” So — wham! — President Donald Trump announced that to get a better deal he was blockading the Strait of Hormuz. Some commentators speculated that with the failure to reach a deal in Islamabad, the United States might be marching deeper into another “forever” war — that the talks could have been a prelude to a new and perhaps more dangerous phase of conflict.

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Edward Chen in Nature:

A woman with an ultra-rare combination of three autoimmune diseases has had no symptoms since receiving a single dose of engineered immune cells, doctors in Germany report today¹. She had previously received nine other types of treatment without getting better, could no longer work and was sometimes bedridden for weeks with pain and fatigue. “Her disease got completely out of hand” and became “very life-threatening”, says Fabian Müller, a haematologist at University Hospital Erlangen in Germany who helped to treat her and co-authored the report.

Without the engineered cells, the woman, who was 47 when she met Müller and his colleagues, would have had a “terrible” quality of life, says Carl June, an immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia who pioneered the use of similar cells to treat cancer, “if she would even be alive”.

More here.

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Richard Norton-Taylor at Literary Review:

It may be thought that the notorious Cambridge spies – the majority of them members of the Apostles, that university’s secretive, elitist society – had been written out. But, as Stalin’s Apostles makes clear, such is not the case. Most of the books on what the KGB later called their ‘Magnificent Five’ – Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross – have dwelt on their early lives, how they were recruited by Soviet talent spotters and through their individual networks, and how they were allowed to spy, undetected, for so long. Antonia Senior’s message in this carefully researched and well-written book, rich in anecdotes and insights, is indicated by the subtitle. Senior, a former student of Christopher Andrew, the pioneering Cambridge historian of Britain’s security and intelligence agencies, concentrates on the lasting damage that the Cambridge spies inflicted by providing Stalin with crucial information about the Western allies’ strategy and priorities (as well as the development of the atom bomb) when it was becoming evident Germany was losing the war.

Churchill and Roosevelt sold the pass at their Yalta summit in February 1945 by accepting that eastern and central Europe would come under Soviet political control.

more here.

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Serge Halimi in Sidecar:

In the aftermath of the French municipal elections last month, only one left-wing party registered concern at a poor result: the embattled Écologistes, who forfeited six of the eight large cities they claimed in the 2020 ‘Green wave’, including Bordeaux. Not for the first time, La France insoumise (LFI) offered a triumphalist reading – ‘remarkable’, a ‘groundswell’ – of a performance that fell short of most expectations. The Parti socialiste (PS), after pointing out that together with allies it still retained seven of France’s ten largest cities – Paris, Lyon and Marseille among them – resumed its perennial internal squabbles over responsibility for those it had lost (Brest, Clermont-Ferrand, Avignon). As for the Parti communiste français (PCF), it bagged Nîmes but saw an erosion of support in working-class strongholds like Vénissieux. The election of its national secretary, Fabien Roussel, as mayor of Saint-Amand-les-Eaux (16,000 inhabitants) chiefly served to cement his candidacy in next year’s presidential race.

Local contests are, it should be said, an unreliable guide to national outcomes. Three years after his capture of the Élysée in 2017, Emmanuel Macron failed to establish a foothold in municipalities large or small; he was nevertheless re-elected two years later.

More here.

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Henry Farrell over at his substack, Programmable Mutter:

Towards the end of his new book, The Irrational Decision, Ben Recht explains what he has set out to do.

Most books on technology either take the side that all technology is bad, or all technology is good. This isn’t one of those books. Such books focus too much on harms and not enough on limits. Limits are more empowering. Throughout the book, I’ve maintained that mathematical rationality is limited in what kinds of problems it is best placed to solve but has sweet spots that have yielded remarkable technological advances.

It may be that more books on technology escape the good-bad dichotomy than Ben allows. Even so, I haven’t read another book that is nearly as useful in explaining why and where the broad family of approaches that we (perhaps unfortunately) call AI work, and why and where they don’t. Ben (who is a mate) combines a deep understanding of the technologies with a grasp of the history and ability to write clearly and well about complicated things. I learned a lot from this book. Very likely, you will too.

The good-bad dichotomy that Ben describes does indeed shape a whole lot of our current debate around “mathematical rationality” and AI.

More here.

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Mona Ali in Equator:

The closure of a strategic waterway by a besieged nation ranks among the rarest and most consequential events in the history of the global economy. It has happened only twice in the postwar era. In 1956, Egypt closed the Suez Canal for five months – an act that broke Britain’s imperial currency and inaugurated the petrodollar age. It demonstrated for the first time that a small country could inflict serious damage on the economic order that had subjugated it. Now Iran has effectively blockaded the Strait of Hormuz, through which a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil passes. The question is whether this crisis heralds the end of American hegemony – and marks the beginning of the struggle over who or what will replace it.

The US-Israeli war on Iran has stranded more than 3000 vessels in the Persian Gulf and left the world short of over eleven million barrels of oil a day. Entire hydrocarbon-based supply chains have been disrupted: not just oil and gas exports but also supplies of urea used in fertiliser, helium for semiconductors and sulphur for defence equipment. Having long suffered under Western sanctions, Iran is now deploying the economic weapon itself.

The effects are ruinous and cascading.

More here.

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Elizabeth Winkler in The New York Times:

On the evening of Nov. 30, 1994, Merlin Holland sat in a dim side aisle of the Église Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the Paris church where, in 1900, Oscar Wilde had been given a quiet, almost clandestine funeral. Holland had spent the day tracing his grandfather’s final, penniless years in exile for a BBC documentary, and it had disturbed him. That evening, several dozen candles were already burning at the entrance to the chapel, far more than on his previous visits. Working out the day, he realized it was the anniversary of his grandfather’s death.

The fans had remembered; he hadn’t. He sat there with his unlit candle, resenting what felt like the intrusion of strangers on a private moment.

Then something shifted. “Blood and history flowed together,” he writes in a new book, “and I found myself the unwilling conduit for a century of unwept family grief”: for Wilde’s two sons, Cyril and Vyvyan, who were raised to forget him; for his wife, Constance, who stood by him through scandal and imprisonment for “gross indecency,” dying within a year of his release; and for Wilde himself, who never saw his family again after prison.

“For the first time,” Holland wrote, “I felt it was part of me, not just cold, bare facts from the past.”

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Two Tramps in Mud Time

Out of the mud two strangers came
And caught me splitting wood in the yard,
And one of them put me off my aim
By hailing cheerily “Hit them hard!”
I knew pretty well why he had dropped behind
And let the other go on a way.
I knew pretty well what he had in mind:
He wanted to take my job for pay.

Good blocks of oak it was I split,
As large around as the chopping block;
And every piece I squarely hit
Fell splinterless as a cloven rock.
The blows that a life of self-control
Spares to strike for the common good,
That day, giving a loose my soul,
I spent on the unimportant wood.

The sun was warm but the wind was chill.
You know how it is with an April day
When the sun is out and the wind is still,
You’re one month on in the middle of May.
But if you so much as dare to speak,
A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,
A wind comes off a frozen peak,
And you’re two months back in the middle of March.

A bluebird comes tenderly up to alight
And turns to the wind to unruffle a plume,
His song so pitched as not to excite
A single flower as yet to bloom.
It is snowing a flake; and he half knew
Winter was only playing possum.
Except in color he isn’t blue,
But he wouldn’t advise a thing to blossom.

The water for which we may have to look
In summertime with a witching wand,
In every wheelrut’s now a brook,
In every print of a hoof a pond.
Be glad of water, but don’t forget
The lurking frost in the earth beneath
That will steal forth after the sun is set
And show on the water its crystal teeth. Read more »

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Daniel T. Blumstein, Peter Mikula, and Piotr Tryjanowski in The Conversation:

The urban monkeys in New Delhi are so bold they’ll steal the lunch right off your plate. If you’ve spent time in New York, you’ve probably seen squirrels try to do the same. Sydney’s white ibises got the nickname “bin chickens” for stealing trash and sandwiches.

This brazen behavior isn’t normal for most species in the countryside, yet it shows up in urban wildlife, and not just in these cities.

Studies show that animals living in urban environments around the world exhibit common sets of behaviors. At the same time, these urban animals are losing traits they would need in the wild. This process of urban animals’ behavior becoming more similar is known as “behavioral homogenization,” and it accompanies the loss of species diversity with urbanization.

We study animals in urban settings to understand how humans can help wildlife thrive in an urbanizing world. In a new study, we explore the causes and the long-term consequences of these behavior changes for urban wildlife.

More here.

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Michael Le Page at New Scientist:

A woman who had three different autoimmune conditions has not required treatments for almost a year after her immune cells were genetically modified and used to kill off the rogue cells attacking her body. “She was deathly sick and bedridden at the time we met her, and we treated her, and seven days later, she got out of bed,” says Fabian Müller at the University Hospital of Erlangen in Germany. Within months she appeared to be fully recovered. “I just saw her yesterday. She’s perfectly fine,” says Müller, speaking 11 months after the treatment.

This woman is one of a growing number of people with autoimmune conditions who have been successfully treated this way, and the first to have three different ones treated simultaneously. “The really crazy thing is that you have three autoimmune diseases, and all three of them, by chance, you can tackle with one treatment,” says Müller.

More here.

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Willy Staley in the New York Times:

Maybe a decade ago, it still felt as if there were a wild expanse within your phone, a portal to a vast and sometimes terrifying alternate dimension. If the sensation resembled anything in the real world, it was vertigo: There was a bottomless pit in the palm of your hand. And since the mass isolation of the pandemic, that feeling has been replaced by a growing sense of claustrophobia. You can leave it in the other room if you want, but your phone still closes in on you. Even if you spend very little time online, there’s little you can do outside the logic of the internet. It is a force that warps our reality, a cosmic background noise that is everywhere and nowhere — something inhuman that’s subtly reshaping our language, our politics, even our minds.

More here.

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Judy Berman in The Time Magazine:

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David Hu in The Scientist:

“Four minutes is too long.”

That’s the note undergraduate Chris Zuo sent me along with photos of countless mosquito bites on his bare skin. This full-body massacre wasn’t the result of a camping trip gone awry. He’d spent that limited amount of time in a room with 100 hungry mosquitoes while wearing nothing but a mesh suit we thought would have protected him.

Thus began our three-year journey trying to understand the behavior of a deceivingly simple insect, the mosquito.¹ It may sound like a professor’s sadistic plan, but, really, we did everything by the book. Our university’s institutional review board approved our procedures, making sure Chris was safe and not coerced in any way. The mosquitoes were disease-free and native to our home state of Georgia. And this session resulted in the first and last bites anyone received during the study.

Besides my role as torturer of students, I am an author and professor at Georgia Tech with over 20 years of experience studying the movement of animals.

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